Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Defused Googlebombs May Backfire

Posted by Zonk on from the gooooobooooom dept.

linguista submits for us today an article on the Guardian site, which theorizes Google's bomb defusing may backfire on the company. Article author Nicholas Carr calls out Google for tweaking search results based on the company public image. As he notes, the Google blog entry announcing the end to bombing didn't cite a desire for better queries as the reason behind the change. Instead "... we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception." While the general image of Google is still that it 'does no evil', it's worth noting that the search engine is not solely a link popularity contest. The results you get from Google are tweaked by a number of factors, and at the end of the day the company has complete control over what rises to the top.

4 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like sour grapes by jandrese · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is it just me, or does it sound like this was written by someone who was previously making a living off of increasing people's pagerank and is now miffed that his job is harder?

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:Sounds like sour grapes by Threni · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, it's not just him. When I go to Google, I expect to spend as little time as possible finding what I want. Google should know what I'm looking for, and by and large it succeeds. If some sad bunch of nerds wants to manipulate sites so that a bogus link between a phrase and a person/organisation is created then they are of course free to do so, and Google is free to take whatever steps it likes to fight it. There's always robots.txt, isn't there, if you want to ensure no-one ever visits your site. Or there's cheating, and getting caught by Google.

    2. Re:Sounds like sour grapes by QuickFox · · Score: 5, Informative

      but other than that they do a pretty good job No, they do a terrible job. They endorse and encourage domain squatting.
      --
      Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
  2. Re:Not specifically targetted by UbuntuDupe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Exactly. I'm tired of people jumping to the conclusion that Google used some crude, quickfix solution to googlebombs, like manually removing that particular bomb, or ending the use of links and pagerank. PLEASE -- give them just a teensy weensy bit of credit here. If you really think they just inserted those particular phrases (e.g., "miserable failure") directly into the search engine's code, then please -- try another Googlebomb. If the fix really was just for the known, existing googlebombs, you should have no problem stacking Google's results again. If you can't do that, then do us a favor, and shut the hell up until you know what you're talking about.

    --
    Apology to Ubuntu forum.